Apple's 'inaccurate statements and FALSE INNUENDO'

QuotW This was the week when Cupertino finally published that statement on its website about how Samsung never infringed on the iPad, but naturally they buried it for Brits under the fold by resizing the whole front page.

Apple had previously published a surly acknowledgement following UK court defeat against Samsung, which led British judges to order the fruitchompers to sort their act out. The beaks were apparently much struck by our headline on the first statement, as their ruling just published today makes even clearer:

The effect of the Contested Notice has indeed been to undermine what was intended. Our attention was specifically drawn, for instance, to an online magazine called "The Register":

APPLE: SCREW YOU, BRITS, everyone else says Samsung copied us

Mr Michael Beloff QC for Apple submitted that Apple could not be held responsible for inaccurate reporting by journalists. But it can, if it contributed to that inaccuracy by inaccurate statements and false innuendo in the Contested Notice as I consider it did.

Apple also lost a patent case over FaceTime to a holding firm, whose lawyer had a bit of plain-speaking to do about the company's attitude to other people's intellectual property. Doug Cawley, a lawyer at McKool Smith, said:

Apple says they don’t infringe. But Apple developers testified that they didn’t pay any attention to anyone’s patents when developing their system

The iDevice-maker has to fork out $368m, not too large a sum for a billion-dollar firm, but it could well be added to by Mexican telco iFone. Foolishly, Apple took iFone to court over their own iPhone patent, but iFone's patent predated its own by around four years. Cupertino lost the case and iFone promptly countersued, and won.

Apple's not giving up on patent court battles though, continuing to pursue Samsung through the US courts. The company wants to see the Jelly Bean OS and the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet added to an existing case against the Korean chaebol. Apple asked the court to tag the devices on to the end of its list, saying:

Shortly after the release of the Galaxy Note 10.1, Apple investigated whether that product infringes the asserted patents. Having now determined that it does infringe – and in a manner remarkably similar to how the already-accused devices infringe – Apple seeks to amend its contentions to include this product.

Meanwhile Linus Torvalds of the Linux Foundation gave a Unix desktop environment a scathing review in his usual wrath-filled way... and then apologised for being such a grump.

It still looks a bit too cartoony, and the default widget/plasmoid behavior with mouse-over pretty much immediately showing the controls for it annoys the hell of me. You can lock the widgets down and they calm down and act normal, but it's some really odd and distracting default behaviour.

Luckily, he was posting on Google+, but still, it wasn't too nice to use the following adjectives in his critique:

Odd, whimsical, mildly amusing, drunken, messy, trippy

After criticising the hell out of KDE, Torvalds told students at a Finnish university that he wasn't the grumpy old man everyone thinks he is, or at least, he doesn't want to be:

I’d like to be a nice person and curse less and encourage people to grow rather than telling them they are idiots. I’m sorry - I tried, it’s just not in me.

And then proceeded to explain how it was other people's fault really:

Some of these projects have the blinders on – they only care about their small world and don’t care about what it does for others. If you have that approach then you shouldn’t be surprised that I’m not interested in the patches you send me. I prefer code that just works and works well on small machines and big machines. It is possible but it takes a lot more effort.

Meanwhile, the great Facebook and Instagram mashup is proceeding apace as Instagram announced web profiles for its users that look suspiciously like a certain social network's front page.

The hipsterati didn't quite know what to make of the move, as some took it at face value as a good place for all their filtered photos and others as the nefarious machinations of a corporate enterprise. They tweeted:

Finally an instagram web profile! We should of had one of these ages ago.

And:

Instagram web profile is a business necessity but one step moving away from this great community feeling.

Still not being quite out of the woods on that whole Megaupload piracy thing hasn't stopped Kim Dotcom from setting up a new website - me.ga. To avoid the legal machinations of the US, Dotcom has a cunning plan: don't use any US businesses - instead use servers in one country, domain names in another, etc. This foolproof stratagem has been foiled already though, by the government of Gabon.

The .ga part of me.ga is Gabon's top level domain and Dotcom was planning to register the site there. But Gabon Communications Minister Blaise Louembe suspended the site as soon as he knew what it was for. He said:

Gabon cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people.

Naturally, Dotcom took to Twitter to lambast the decision and the Gabon government and accuse it of being in league with the Feds:

Gabon Minister used time machine to analyze legality of the future Mega. Verdict: Cyber crime! Gets 5$ award from the FBI.

Don't worry. We have an alternative domain. This just demonstrates the bad faith witch hunt the US government is on.

The possibility of being banged up for privacy also hasn't done anything to daunt Dotcom's wild ambitions. While he's setting up Megaupload 2 me.ga, he's also looking to get into the cable business. He tweeted:

The new Mega company will be based in NZ & become it's most valuable IT biz. I will relaunch Pacific Fibre. Free broadband for all Kiwi's :)

Seeing interest from Arab investors. They see an opportunity to own a big chunk of the Internet? Me.ga & Megabox will be huge. ®